7 ideas
| 10121 | Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor lack of contradiction a sign of truth [Pascal] |
| Full Idea: Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth. | |
| From: Blaise Pascal (works [1660]), quoted by A.George / D.J.Velleman - Philosophies of Mathematics Ch.6 | |
| A reaction: [Quoted in Auden and Kronenberger's Book of Aphorisms] Presumably we would now say that contradiction is a purely formal, syntactic notion, and not a semantic one. If you hit a contradiction, something has certainly gone wrong. |
| 21226 | Husserl sees the ego as a monad, unifying presence, sense and intentional acts [Husserl, by Velarde-Mayol] |
| Full Idea: Husserl's notion of monad expresses a complete inegration of every intentional presence into its sense, and every sense into the intentional acts, ....and finally every intentional act is integrated into the ego. | |
| From: report of Edmund Husserl (Cartesian Meditations [1931]) by Victor Velarde-Mayol - On Husserl 4.6.2 | |
| A reaction: No, I don't understand that either, but it makes good sense to employ the concept of a 'monad' into the concept of the ego, if you think it embodies perfect unity. That was a main motivation for Leibniz to employ the word. |
| 21228 | Husserl's monads (egos) communicate, through acts of empathy. [Husserl, by Velarde-Mayol] |
| Full Idea: For Husserl monads have windows because they communicate with each other. The windows of the monads are the acts of empathy. | |
| From: report of Edmund Husserl (Cartesian Meditations [1931]) by Victor Velarde-Mayol - On Husserl 4.7.5 | |
| A reaction: Leibniz said his monads (which include minds) have 'no windows'. The mere existence of empathy (or mirror neurons, as we would say) is hardly sufficient to defeat solipsism. |
| 21225 | The psychological ego is worldly, and the pure ego follows transcendental reduction [Husserl, by Velarde-Mayol] |
| Full Idea: Husserl distinguishes two sorts of egos or subjects of experience, the psychological ego and the pure ego. The psychological ego is a reality of the world, and the pure ego is a result of transcendental reduction. | |
| From: report of Edmund Husserl (Cartesian Meditations [1931]) by Victor Velarde-Mayol - On Husserl 4.6.1 | |
| A reaction: The sounds like embracing both the Cartesian and the Kantian egos. This is obviously the source of Sartre's interesting early book on the self. 'Transcendental reduction' is his bracketing or epoché. |
| 12167 | Reference without predication is the characteristic of expression [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Characteristic of expression is the presence of 'reference' without predication. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Representation in Music [1976], p.71) | |
| A reaction: This echoes (in linguistic terms) Kant's thought that art is 'purposive without purpose'. The remark is comfortable in an essay on music, but it gets more tricky when the topic is literature, or even representational painting. |
| 12166 | If music refers to love, it contains no predication, so it is expression, not language [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: If a passage carries a reference to love, we are not told what it says about love. And to speak of language with 'reference' but no predication is simply to misuse the word. We leave the realm of representation and enter that of expression. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Representation in Music [1976], p.63-4) | |
| A reaction: This is a beautifully simple objection to the idea (associated with Nelson Goodman) that art is a language. Though what an 'expression' of something amounts to I am not quite sure. |
| 12168 | Music is not representational, since thoughts about a subject are never essential to it [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Music is not representational, since thoughts about a subject are never essential to the understanding of music. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Representation in Music [1976], p.74) | |
| A reaction: I would not have thought that many people thought music was representational, but Scruton particularly mentions passages in opera that seem to pick up aspects of the story. Do even bell sounds not represent bells? |